My View: Obamacare should be abandoned

Sunday

Apr 20, 2014 at 8:00 PM

Kim McCloskey’s defense of Obamacare was scripted and expected.

No prior social welfare legislation of this magnitude was ever adopted without bipartisan support. While the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was “sold” to Americans as a way to insure persons with preexisting conditions and persons without insurance, it has robbed 6 million families of their coverage, with millions more policies to “hit the fan” this fall as employers review their options. The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats running in the midterm elections.

These millions of families were told that their plans were “substandard.” Oddly enough, the insured had liked their plans. They liked their doctors, and their hospitals and clinics. They could afford their premiums, and their deductibles were reasonable.

Their premiums in the Obamacare market are higher. In some cases, deductibles have doubled! And the “Cadillac plan” foisted on them contains far more benefits than most of these families want or need — but they will have to pay for them.

Was the real goal of Obamacare to bring middle class America to its knees? It almost seems so.

Worse than the effects on family budgets, many persons under treatment for cancer have lost access to their doctors and their medical facilities. The law’s strict cost-cutting pressures caused insurers to drop providers, particularly specialists of every sort. Pediatric hospitals, and teaching and research centers were dropped, the places most “cutting-edge” for cancer care.

Call them “unintended consequences” if you must — that is small comfort to patients whose doctors, hospitals and drug therapies have been denied them. In New Hampshire, the single insurer offering plans on the Granite State’s exchange has contracted “with (only) 16 of the 26 acute general care hospitals in the state.”

A poster on Facebook aptly summarizes the law:

OBAMACARE: To insure the uninsured, first we make the insured uninsured. Then we make the formerly insured pay more to become re-insured to insure the uninsured for free.

No one knows what gun was held to the head of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts when he wrote his majority opinion supporting the law, but the law is lawless as currently enforced. Our president, by dictate, has changed it 22 times.

Even some Democrats will admit that the law was less about providing a health benefit than it was about gaining control over people. King George’s Stamp Act pales in comparison with this law! Is this still America? Two or three 10-page bills could have achieved the expressed goals of insuring the uninsured.

The Congressional Research Service reports the law has created an unknown number (“dozens”) of new entities to implement the law. The law does not need to be “tweaked.” It needs to be abandoned at the earliest opportunity.

Read about a health care system that actually works in Michael Kalthoff’s book, “Saving Private Healthcare.”

Jane Ryan Carrell is a former Northern IL Tea Party board member. She can be reached at FightinIL@gmail.com